Previous Talk

The Cinemas in Newcastle

The entry below is a synopsis of our speakers talk on 28th September 2022.

Malcolm started his talk “what was done by the population 1,365,000,000 times in 1946” and the answer was visit the cinema which equates to about 34 times for everybody in 1 week, the press asked “what is cinema photography”.

The Palace Theatre Newcastle was the first to give a cinema performance in 1926 and these shows were an advanced form of the older magic lanterns as it removed the flicker of the film by increasing the number of photos per second on the reel but the take up reel had not been thought of and the film once having gone through the projector was caught in a bin below the projector and it then had to be re-winded back onto the film reel by hand.

Malcolm went on to talk about all the cinemas in Newcastle that started up after this and said that the annual take was about 36 Billion per year, he mentioned that the big variety theatres never thought that it would not catch on but had to admit they were wrong. There was a reduction in attendances when Television started and this made a marked difference as the TV technology improved, several cinema’s had to close and only started to become more popular when the block buster films started to come out and were not shown on TV after a set period was completed.

This was a very interesting presentation and was well received by our members.

Questions on several points were asked through the presentation.

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